With recent progress in the data processing technology, more systems are made available for voice processing. These voice processing systems may be merged together with other capabilities such as facsimile, e-mail and the like. In operation, a user connects to the voice processing systems to request access to any of a plurality of different applications, including fax-on-demand, directory assistance, e-commerce, voice-mail, personal information management, database access and the like. The interaction between the user and the voice processing systems could take many forms, including: a remote user dialing into a computerized voice response system, a user speaking in a microphone on a desktop computer connected to a network, a user of personal digital assistants connected to a wireless network, a user as a participant of a meeting with several microphones around the room, or a user of other devices with speech input capability connected to a computer network.
In voice processing systems, voice processing resources such as processor time and memory space are utilized to perform tasks on the accessed application. Exemplary voice processing systems include a plurality of servers connected by a network, each server including engines for performing tasks including speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker identification, and the like. In voice processing systems connected to a telephone network, in order to provide services over the telephone, whether it is by landline, mobile, voice over IP, or the like, telephony equipment is also included in one or more servers.
With recent progress, it is desirable to access large applications with a large number of requests and large volumes of data. For example, in a telephony-based voice processing system, thousands of users may be calling simultaneously, and a server dedicated to speech recognition tasks, for example, may have to handle many grammars containing hundreds of thousands or millions of entries, such as lists of products, people, addresses, or city names.
In these voice processing systems, one or more servers are dedicated to one or more of the tasks. Thus, any given server can handle all the tasks in one class of tasks, and a task is typically allocated by selecting the least loaded server.
Since any of the engines on the servers may be required to handle any task in its class, each server must have the resources to handle the most resource-intensive of the tasks. Hence all engines require the same, large and costly resources.